State of the Writer: March 2013

Pretend the 2013 goals are here. It’s not been the best of months, I’ll be blunt. Not much writing got done, by which I mean almost no writing got done. We’re still trying to figure out how to schedule our time, and what’s currently winning is our daughter being the cutest baby on the planet! I get home with her, and I don’t want to write I want to bounce her for most of the afternoon. That doesn’t mean I haven’t done some thinking about the Sarah Constant series, moving around some plot lines between the planned books, fleshing out some conversations I want to write, things like that.

Hopefully going into March I find a more consistent time to sit down and write. Might start doing it after baby’s bedtime, though I love having that time to devour books.

On another, and more personal front, I’ve been informed that job I currently have won’t exist in the near future due to a corporate realignment. Don’t feel too sorry for me, I’ve been given a massive five months to figure out what the hell I’m going to do with my career going forward, and I’ve already got a résumé polished and a few good opportunities to send it to. However that does mean that some of my writing time, both for fiction and this blog, will now become job hunting time over the next few weeks and months. What can I say, I guess I’ve hit one of those points in my life where changes come fast and furious, over a one year period my first baby and my first involuntary departure from a job.

So if the blog is a little light going forward, or at times perhaps the tone a little more melancholy, that’s why.

Still, I hope this pushes me to write a little more. It isn’t lost on me that if this happened when I had three novels out rather than three short stories, I’d be in a better position to say “to heck with it, I’m going to try making a go as a writer.” Maybe next time.

State of the Author’s Beer: Still mellowing, but getting more and more drinkable. Next batch isn’t yet planned, got to empty some bottles first.

State of the Author’s Bees: We’ve ordered two packages to replace our failed hives, which should arrive in mid-April, so more news then.

And, of course, we’re going into month three of the Great Hugo Read. There’s no secondary book this month, but the primary book marks both the Audible, Kindle, Nook, and iBooks debuts of the Read for those who prefer audio or electronic editions. The book is Robert Heinlein’s Double Star, the first of five Heinlein books that will come up as part of the Read, first of two this year alone. Here’s your standard where-to-find-it information:

At first blush it sounds like a science-fiction version of the movie Dave:

One minute, down and out actor Lorenzo Smythe was — as usual — in a bar, drinking away his troubles as he watched his career go down the tubes. Then a space pilot bought him a drink, and the next thing Smythe knew, he was shanghaied to Mars.

Suddenly he found himself agreeing to the most difficult role of his career: impersonating an important politician who had been kidnapped. Peace with the Martians was at stake — failure to pull off the act could result in interplanetary war. And Smythe’s own life was on the line — for if he wasn’t assassinated, there was always the possibility that he might be trapped in his new role forever!

I guess I should say a science-fiction version of the movie Dave done as an action thriller rather than a romantic comedy.